E NFOQUE A LA E XCELENCIA Y SUS R EQUERIMIENTOS B ÁSICOS

We can begin by being deliberately woman centered, by assuming that women not only participated in a variety of ways, but they were, in some way, central to ancient rhetorical education and performance. Being woman centered “. . . means ignoring all evidence of women‟s marginality, because, even where women appear to be marginal, this is the result of patriarchal invention” (Lerner Patriarchy 228). We can take our cues from Royster‟s experience

of suffering from the “. . . deep disbelief. . .” of traditionally told histories and the biased webs

they weave (Royster 254). It is up to us to engage similarly in deep disbelief that initially

constrained, then empowered Royster in her research about African-American women. Instead of deeply disbelieving women‟s participation in ancient rhetoric, we need to apply, purposefully,

deep disbelief to the exclusionary history of rhetoric as it stands and assume women were active

and important participants. Disbelief combined with a gynocentric view means scholars assume women participated and that ancient texts reveal useful evidence to document ancient women‟s activities and influence.

Likewise, Bizzell in “Opportunities for Feminist Research in the History of Rhetoric,” suggests that researchers become resisting readers, meaning that readers must not believe

discover obscured historical women and their works. Bizzell suggests that feminist

historiographers look for “. . . what is not there, not preserved, and [ask] why it is not” (Bizzell, “Editing” 112). We can fuel our resistance by choosing an intellectual stance of sustained deep

disbelief. As Mary Daly states, we must ". . . reverse the reversals [so we can] learn to see with our own eyes" (Daly 46-47). Choosing a stance of deep disbelief is one way to reverse the reversals in order to discover women that scholars have missed or misinterpreted. In order to re- collect, re-member women‟s history, we must “. . . see beyond the familiar, to the unfamiliar, to the unseen” (Glenn “Remapping”291).The assumption that women were able and did contribute

to the ancient world is an essential shift in our focus that may allow scholars not only to discover ancient women to research, but also to identify how they were able to do so in a historical period in which material conditions may have been very different from those of contemporary women.

Glenn writes similarly about deep disbelief and seeing anew; “[h]istoriography, reading it crookedly and telling it slant, could help me shape—re-member—a female rhetorical presence” (Glenn Rhetoric Retold 8). One way to see crookedly is to interrogate much of the previous scholarship about ancient women‟s lives and the application of historical scholarship. A hazard of scholarship about the ancient world, directly related to the paucity of texts, has to do with the tendency to generalize women‟s conditions based on an oversimplified model of women‟s lives in Classical Athens. This model asserts that women lived in seclusion, that they did not have access to education or literacy, and that they had no control over their own thinking or actions. In

Women in Hellenistic Egypt: From Alexander to Cleopatra Pomeroy explains how the paucity of texts encouraged scholars to generalize the conditions of women in Classical Athens to the entire ancient world. Hence, what scholars assume was true in Classical Athens has been misapplied to the rest of the Greco-Roman world across a period of several centuries. She explains the

oversimplification by noting that we have more extant texts from Classical Athens than from any other place in the ancient world (Pomeroy Women in Hellenistic Egypt xv). Nonetheless, the model of Classical Athens is problematic for two reasons. First, the assumption that Classical Greek women‟s lives were homogenous is inaccurate and second, application of the model to all women in the ancient world does not accurately take the variety of contexts into consideration. Without specific contexts by which to understand the meaning of women‟s rhetoric and

rhetorical acts, historical women remain invisible to us. In part, it is probably because feminist scholars have not sufficiently interrogated the “fact” of women‟s confinement, for example, to

the domestic sphere that there has been no single recovery of an additional woman from the ancient world for the rhetorical canon since Glenn‟s significant 1997 work. Furthermore, the

homogenization of women is a patriarchal construct that feminist scholars need to resist. When we “. . . articulate gender in terms of specific socio-historical configurations,” feminists

dismantle one structure of misogynist histories (D. Miller 373-374).

The question of the seclusion of Athenian women, for example, is yet unsettled. Susan Jarratt notes that it is because we do not have much physical evidence of women‟s lives in ancient Greece that we have depended on ideology to „fill in‟ what we didn‟t know. Instead of

understanding Greek women as secluded, she understands “. . . the „private‟ house of the nuclear family was not the private of a purely feminized domestic space. Nor is the house itself clearly divided into male-and female-inhabited spaces” (Jarratt “Sappho‟s Memory” 16). Swearingen argues “. . . even within Athens. . . the conventions governing women in public and private spaces, and the divisions between those spaces, were far from uniform” (Swearingen qtd. in

Lunsford 26-27). Many other scholars, male and female, question the authority and validity of such claims about ancient women. Sealy argues “[E]ven among the [wealthy] Athenians only a

minority could afford the status symbol of a wife who did not go out of the house to work” (154). In “Rhetoric, Possibility, and Women‟s Status in Ancient Athens: Gorgias‟ and Isocrates‟

Encomiums of Helen,” Biesecker argues that historians Cantarella and Pomeroy read “. . . texts

of philosophy, history, oratory, and literature as reflections of social relations in ancient Greece,” which may occlude subtleties that could have had profound impact on our understanding of Athenian women (Biesecker “Rhetoric, Possibility” 101). Biesecker continues to argue that Pericles‟ citizenship law of 451/450 BCE requiring women as well as men to be Athenian-born implicitly made women citizens. The law “. . . acknowledged citizenship of women, created space for resistance or to challenge their exclusion from the public sphere” (Biesecker “Rhetoric, Possibility” 105). In her consideration of Gorgias‟s Encomium, Biesecker argues that Gorgias‟s

consideration of several reasons for Helen‟s actions created competing voices that “. . . spell

socio-political upheaval . . . [and] . . . alternative versions of the status of women in society” (Biesecker “Rhetoric, Possibility” 105). Katz traces the assertion Athenian women were secluded to the eighteenth century, stating that it “. . . formed part of the intellectual currency of the

eighteenth century, and played an important role in the general debate over the form and nature of civil society” (Katz 35). New research supports the claims of Jarratt, Sealy, Biesecker in its

reconsideration of our knowledge of ancient women‟s lives; those interested in recovering ancient women have more resources available than ever before to embark on it.

Furthermore, if women were confined to the oikos (home), is it possible that confinement to the home of a philosopher, for example, allowed aristocratic unmarried women access to education conducted by their fathers? What about aristocratic women married to philosophers? While even aristocratic women would have been responsible for household management, may they have had time to write? It is likely that women‟s household duties would have changed

during the course of their lifetimes; is it possible that women had time to write after they were married and before they bore children? What about women past the age of child-bearing? Appendixes A and B and the works cited of this text list scholarship that counters the homogenization of ancient women that has resulted in oversimplifications and inaccurate assumptions about the lives, conditions, and activities of ancient women.

Hypatia is an excellent example of how the assumptions of women‟s lives in Classical Athens do not apply to other places and times of antiquity, for example, in Roman Alexandria. Hypatia was not secluded, did not marry, or bear children. She was educated and became a teacher of men who was responsible for the administration of her own school in Alexandria. She appeared in public without a chaperone and evidence suggests she did not have a legal guardian. Hypatia‟s ethnicity, Greco-Egyptian, was mixed, so she lived her life following the Greek

intellectual tradition while also following Egyptian customs and laws concerning women. Within the context of Roman Alexandria, Hypatia‟s activities were not only allowed, they were

empowered. Furthermore, I identify other women with varying social and material conditions in Alexandria and in the greater Mediterranean who also do not meet the paradigm of Classical Athens so often misapplied. The information appears in Appendix B. The model of Classical Athens cannot account for Hypatia of Alexandria‟s life, and my study of her demands

reconsideration of other women who may have lived enabled lives.